Businesses commonly advertise through many different media in order to attract leads. Advertisements (commonly referred to as “ads”) reach customers by way of a variety of modalities including: online websites, printed publications, radio and television broadcasts, direct mailings, emails, and other mediums in which customers are likely to receive the ads.
Increasingly, businesses are focusing their advertising efforts on online or Internet advertisements. As online advertising spending continues to climb, there is a strong interest in being able to attribute customer actions to a particular advertisement or marketing channel. Actions that occur during a visit to a website, such as submitting an inquiry form, downloading a file, and the like, can be tracked and associated with other visitor information including: a visitor source channel, a searched keyword term, and the like. However, offline actions, such as Short Message Services (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), and the like (commonly referred to as text messages), cannot typically be tracked in the same manner.
Current methods for associating text messages with visitor data involve assigning a unique telephone number to each advertisement created. In this scenario, if a visitor sends a text message to a business by way of a particular telephone number, it can be assumed that the visitor viewed the associated advertisement that displayed that specific telephone number. This method of associating a text message with a website visit is inefficient because it requires a business to purchase a large number of telephone numbers such that each advertisement can be associated with its own telephone number.
Another alternative known method involves dynamically assigning forwarding telephone numbers for each visit and/or page-view. This alternative known method creates an increasing uncertainty when the number of visitors and page-views increases and/or when tracked details are more refined. For example, tracking keywords compared to merely tracking all visits from organic searches. This is because a finite number of telephone numbers are spread and recycled through an increasing number of possible visit information combinations. For instance, if an interior design company merely tracked a visitor source, all visits from organic searches would be assigned the same telephone number. However, to track each keyword searched, a unique telephone number would be assigned to each phrase. Thus, “sofa upholstery” and “couch upholstery” would require different telephone numbers. Since the business owns a finite pool of telephone numbers, which are dynamically assigned and reused, the method of dynamically assigning and reusing the telephone numbers increases the likelihood that an identical phone number would be reused frequently enough to render the system error-prone.
Additionally, if the telephone number is displayed on multiple areas on the web page, this method would not be capable of disclosing which telephone number a visitor clicked to text. Such data would be important for a business attempting to understand which area of the web page attracts the attention of the visitors. To accomplish this with the current method, a business would need to feature different telephone numbers on the same page, which would be impractical.
Furthermore, the current method for associating a chat or text message with a website visit uses analytics collected by the SMS or a chat tracking system independently, which does not connect the tracking to the website's existing web analytics system. This approach limits the availability of data, since the website's analytics system specializes in collecting a wide array of visitor data.
Additionally, current tracking methods interfere with the branding efforts of businesses, as it may be desirable for customers to associate a particular business with a particular or memorable telephone number.
Furthermore, traditional tracking methods involve passing an SMS through the mentioned tracking numbers, which incurs charges based on the usage of the network associated with these numbers (for instance, per SMS sent or received). For a business with substantial SMS volume, the cost associated with such a setup is significant.
What is desired is a method for connecting text messages and chat data to one or more computer systems that issue user-level identifiers. The desired method would unleash a stream of opportunities for improved analytics and operations of a business.